schnatterer

6 concise minutes of something we all should know and care about

Can we interpret this as a reaction to Google open sourcing mantis? https://github.com/google/mantis/

What about privacy? No one here wonders what kind of data your car leaks to Apple/Google?

What would you say are the main lessons to be learned here for all sides?

Any experiences running k3d on podman? It's my daily provider of local kubernetes.

Meanwhile in Luxembourg: Google loses fight against EU’s $4.7 billion Android fine https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/other/google-loses-fight-aga...

Can you give some examples for the claim that most of the attacks don't make it upstream? My gut tells me that, yes, mostly binaries have been compromised. But I am sure you have some real-world examples proving the point.

This repo also holds a lot of info about setting up two way mirrors between GitHub and Codeberg: https://codeberg.org/Recommendations/Mirror_to_Codeberg

Last commit is two years ago, but still a good overview.

Original 404media article:

https://www.404media.co/elite-the-palantir-app-ice-uses-to-f...

https://archive.ph/wa32f

The toni boxes are also quite hackable https://tonies-wiki.revvox.de/

At least the older model. Don't know about their latest model with gaming and everything.

> Even GitOps tools that embrace git as a source of truth have to work around its limitations

I'd say this only applies to huge scale (or monorepos, as mentioned in the article). Another workaround might be gitless gitops via OCI.

OpenDesk is basically a huge helm file that configures the individual apps. Given enough RAM it should be rather simple to deploy. You can start right away, there is a community edition: https://gitlab.opencode.de/bmi/opendesk/deployment/opendesk

I am surprised that no one criticized kernel architecture as base for a secure mobile OS, yet.

Let me heat up the discussion using this quote

> The Linux kernel has atrocious security. It has an anti-security architecture, implementation and culture. The Linux kernel is not a good base for building any new operating system with a focus on privacy and security

https://grapheneos.social/@GrapheneOS/114665594121762341

> business logic and http status codes Why hold this custom mapping in our working memory? It's better to abstract away your business details from the HTTP transfer protocol, and return self-descriptive codes directly in the response body: { "code": "jwt_has_expired" }

While the logic behind it sounds reasonable, REST does the exact opposite with the same goal: simplicity, easy to learn, i.e. reduce mental load. I know there are other reasons for REST/SOAP/Graphql, etc. Still makes mental load a somewhat subjective matter to me.

I'd like to add one more finding about the perils of root access: https://github.com/chenxiaolong/my-avbroot-setup/blob/c52e44...

> The term [rooting] generally also includes the functionality for making runtime code patches (eg. with Zygisk) and making runtime filesystem modifications (eg. Magisk modules).

> Out of the many root-enabled apps I've studied or reverse engineered, the vast majority fail to handle arbitrary inputs properly (especially filenames). For example, some root-supporting file managers turn a seemingly benign action like listing a directory into local privilege escalation. This is trivially exploitable, especially with browsers auto-downloading files with server-provided filenames to /sdcard/Download/.

To avoid repeated root access UI prompts, some apps spawn a long-running shell session, write commands to stdin, and rely on parsing stdout and searching for the shell prompt to determine when commands complete. This approach is prone to desync, which can lead to commands being skipped or other inputs being interpreted as commands.

All in all, I simply do not trust most root-enabled apps to not leave a gaping security hole, so I avoid them entirely. There are apps that do handle root access in what I would consider a more proper way, by spawning a daemon as root and then talking to the daemon over a well defined binary protocol. Unfortunately, this approach is the extreme minority.

As someone who cherishes the power of root privs, I'd still like to make a point for alternative solutions that came up like distros such as GrapheneOS or CalyxOS or non-root filtering options via VPN. If it weren't for backups I could manage my everyday life without root. For all other cases I would root and later unroot my phone via an OTA update :D https://github.com/schnatterer/rooted-graphene/

Hopefully GrapheneOS deliver on their promise to provide a better backup solutions than seedvault.

I found this description about the security risks of rooting very eye-opening https://madaidans-insecurities.github.io/android.html It also explains the sandbox.

Interesting as companion for a phone. Anyone know of a hackable or privacy friendly standalone watch that can be used to make calls (e.g. for children pre smartphone age)?

My search for a generic definition of the term enterprise finally comes to an end :D

A bought several chromcasts pver the years, mainly because they provide a simple and uniform way to retrofit multi-room sound into my collection of sound systems from different brands an eras. Surprised not to see more comments on this topic here.

Yes, video streaming can be done easily nowadays. But finding a multi-room audio solution that works across different brands and also on offline devices was my main reason for getting into chromcast.

That's interesting! Before the disaster was also my second subscription. Now that you say it, some data was left. Not the playlists but some listening history. Might be that they only delete the iTunes-related stuff.

Maybe if I subscribed again, there still would be something. But I won't.

The support person on the phone also told me that everything gets deleted once the subscription ends, even when it's by mistake. Which seems to have been the case with me.

True! If read before about similar cases with other SaaS, e.g. the famous one about google drive: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/aug/22/google-cs...

Difficult to avoid though for some cases like streaming. Fortunately I had a backup of my playlists. Still annoying. I wonder if those kinds of things happen with spotify as well. Because once your subscription ends you're only relegated to a free account, not deleted.

Happened to me too with apple music in November 23. They just deleted my account with my playlists and listening history. Even support couldn't tell me why after countless calls and emails. This implicitly canceled my yearly subscription and refunded only a small part after I requested it. I learned my lesson about Apple.

TBH I totally agree with the peace of mind argument You'll have to have the time and skills to get it, though. For my less teach-savy family and friends I always have been at a lost what to recommend. Here, a privacy friendly alternative is huge, IMO. I often recommended to use Google as backup, because it's better than no backup and easy to setup on Android.

One advantage Ente provides to a local NAS is geo redundancy. If your nas gets destroyed eg by fire or water or stolen eg by burglar or even the police your data is gone. Synology offers their convenient C2 service, but IIRC has or had some cryptographic weakness. So I hacked my own solution with rclone and some cheap cloud storage. Well, something like Ente would have been much more convenient.

This post has a similar tune:

How to Write a Git Commit Message / The seven rules of a great Git commit message https://cbea.ms/git-commit/#seven-rules